A strange book to teach English from. Unfortunately, I have not seen the
movie and you offer no context. I think you have correctly surmised that
the root -sabu must be from msabu `Mem-Sahib'. Kikuyu and Swahili are both
Bantu languages of East Africa and both use the so-called ifataki `prefixes
(sort of)'. Thus, ki- prefixed to a root generally has the meaning of
`thing; defective person', etc., so kiswahili = the swahili language. The
m- prefix usually indicates `person'. Thus, kitu = thing, mtu = person,
kitoto/totu = baby, mtoto = child. The checkered history of East Africa has
left its imprint in Swahili in many loan words, with the usual
misunderstandings, false analogies, etc. Thus, the Swahili word for `book'
is kitabu, borrowed from Semitic (cf. Yiddish ksav-yad `manuscript'),
probably Arabic. By analogy, one can hear mtabu `scholar, book-man', as if
kitabu were based on a root -tabu. Foreigners, even Tarzan, are notorious
for not being able to pronounce the prefixed nasal, and for adding a vowel,
either before or after the m-. The British carried the word mem-sahib
(itself a bastard form from ma'am sahib `Mrs. Boss') everywhere; it the
movie Those Magnificent Men and their Flying Machines, the old retired
colonel who had lived in India calls his wife `The Mem-Sahib'. It would be
quite natural for a Kikuyu servant (I should have said mkuyu servant) to
understand the mem- of mem-sahib as the prefix to a root *-saab, *-sabu,
which I don't know, nor is it in my Standard Swahili Dictionary; but, then,
you said it was Kikuyu; my Kikuyu friends don't know it either. Continuing
along, the Indian presence in East Africa is old and large; occasionally
nationalists will try to kick all the wahindi out, as I think Idi-Amin did.
Swahili, splendid language that it is, is almost like English; it has taken
over words from many languages. You have to watch out for the spelling and
be on the qui vive; the Labour party used to be called leba, for example.
Jim Marchand.
(4) --------------------------------------------------------------15----
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 93 22:11:08 PDT
From: Paul Brians <BRIANS@WSUVM1>
Subject: Re: 7.0062 Rs: Literary and Film Jesuits; Jawboning (3/50)

Jesuits figure prominently in Voltaire's Candide, of course. And
they come in for some nasty comments in The Brothers Karamazov by
Dostoyevsky, who hated Voltaire, but agreed with him about Jesuits.
(5) --------------------------------------------------------------29----
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 93 10:30:18 BST
From: "J.H.Sawday" <J.H.Sawday@southampton.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: 7.0061 Rs: Eating and Digesting (3/56)

Richard Overton (Leveller), in _The Baiting of the Great Bull of Bashan_ (1649)
poses the problem of diversity of interpretation in the following way: "The
figure is but the shell; will you not crack the shell to take out the kernel?
Pass through the Parable to the moral thereof?" See: Howard Erskine-Hill and
Graham Storey (eds.), _Revolutionary Prose of the English Civil War_
(Cambridge: CUP, 1983) 147. On eating and digesting as a means of writing
texts, doesn't Erasmus (_Adages_) have something to say about this, following
Quintillian? I seem to remember Terence Cave's _The Cornucopian Text: Problems
of Writing in the French Renaissance_ (London & Oxford: OUP, 1981) talking
about this.